Laurence : Free ebooks
What is it? www.ebooksgratuits.com is a website people can use to download ebooks in French from a free source. Free because, as the website says, the books do not have any authors or editors' copyrights. The website is managed by volunteers organized under a Yahoo group "groupe Yahoo Ebooks libres et gratuits". It is for the whole francophone community. They want to create and publish electronic books where no copyright laws apply. To know when copyrights apply or not, users have to be aware of the copyright policies of their country. If the copyrights apply (for example, an author has to be dead for fifty years for it to be free of copyrights), the users have to restrain themselves from downloading. Also, users should not download the ebooks for a commercial use; it should remain a private use only. The website has partners with whom ebooks are exchanged. These partners are Bibliothèque électronique du Québec, Bibliothèque numérique romande, Efele.net, Feedbooks, La Bibliothèque Russe et Slave, Les Échos du Maquis, Project Gutenberg, Wikisource. Four of these partners and Ebooksgratuits.com form together a catalog. How are the ebooks created? Although some of the books might have some mistakes, there are several types of books from classics such as Voltaire to popular contemporary books. When the books do contain mistakes, it is mostly due to the process of putting them on the web. This process starts with the scanning of the paper books done by the volunteers. Then, there is an OCR (optical character recognition) applied. Sadly, this part of the process is where the mistakes occur. After, there is a minimum of two volunteers reading each text and correcting them. However, because they are volunteers, some of them do not have a background in professional proofreading. This is why some mistakes stay in the ebooks; whereas in a professional version, they would be corrected. To be able to put the book in a electronic format, there are several steps taken by the volunteers. Firstly, there is the scan or OCR processes and the proofreading as explained in the previous section. Two of the frequent volunteers copy the books by typing them. The proofreading consists in a conscientious reading to compare each word in the book to the words in the ebook. It is also a moment to complete some cut sentences and put the paragraphs in the right order. Then, there is the layout and a second proofreading. This is an important step assumed only by two people. Thirdly, there is a final reading for the last errors. Finally, one of the persons who takes care of the second phase is also in charge of converting the book in the many formats, with the help of someone else. The ebooks are now ready to be published on the website. Even if some steps are mostly done by the two or three same persons, volunteers are accepted for the first and third steps. Therefore, the website is entirely maintained by volunteers. People can subscribe by sending a list of errors found in a book to a certain email address. Also, even if it is made by volunteers, EBooksgratuits ask for donations everywhere on their website. How does downloading an ebook work? When using the EBooksgratuits website, there is a downloading maximum of fifty books every day for each person. Also, it is not allowed to download several books at the same time. More than five in one minute might even banished the IP address of the user from the website. Ebooksgratuits explains that it might damage their website. They advise users to wait for the book to be completely downloaded before starting the downloading of a new one. However, the website proposes a simple way to download many books at the same time without damaging the server. The solution is to use Bittorrent. It is all explain on the website how to install Torrent software depending on if it is on a Windows, Mac or Linux platform. Then there are some Torrent links for every kind of devices used to read ebooks such as epub and PDF (Sony readers) or Mobipocket (Kindle readers). Each Torrent links has to be updated from time to time with new links offer on the website. Even when trying to save some time by using Torrent software, the downloading process can still be quite long. Nevertheless, it is a better option than trying to download five books at a time and risking being banned from the website. Which devices can be used? Ebooks can be downloaded onto many kinds of devices. IPad and IPhone need Staza app already installed on the devices to accept downloads. Android works well with Aldiko app when using the epub format. If it is an eReader format, it has to be used with the same app. Other formats could be Mobipocket Reader, BBeB Sony Reader, Acrobat Reader, etc. EBooksGratuits does not function well on Internet Explorer. It is better to use Chrome or another kind of platform for Internet. Sometimes, when opening an ebook directly on the website, it will appear in data code. If the file is saved under another format, it will open the ebook well written. DRM : digital right management DRM or Digital Right Management is one of the reasons why Ebooksgratuits.com exists. On their website, there are a few places where a logo “Lecteurs contre les DRM” (readers against DRM) appears. Ebooksgratuits.com wants to promote a downloading free from the copyrights imposed them. They argue that DRM technologies try to control what users can or cannot do on what they bought. Digital Right Management is a system that stops people from using certain contents under copyrights. Copyrights holders use these systems to secure from threats the rights they have on devices or eBooks. The publishers of eBooks use this technology a lot. There are multiple ways DRM apply on eBooks. For example, some eBooks can only be read on a specific type of reader. Some readers use DRM so people won’t be able to share the eBook they download. Ebooksgratuits.com is one of several website to promote free DRM eBooks and it is linked with a bigger foundation against DMR, the Free Software Foundation. Conclusion With a downloading last month of 274493 ebooks, we could say that the website works well. As Manuel Castells says in Innovation, information technology and the culture of freedom, “In open source, property is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not to exclude” and Ebooksgratuits achieve its objectives. Sources http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ebooks.php http://www.fsf.org/ http://www.digital-copyright.ca/drm http://www.certicom.com/index.php/digital-right-management https://www.eff.org/issues/drm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#DRM_and_e-books Manuel Castells, 2005. "Open source as social organization of production and as form of technological innovation based on a new conception of property rights", presentation at the World Social Forum 2005, http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/2623.html